Re:Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome
by Resident_Geek on Monday March 11, 2013 @11:37PM
(#5359967)
Objectively? That's a dangerous word; I hope you've got a better argument than this one. Hard drives are being rapidly replaced by SSDs, so their speed just jumped _way_ up (especially start-up and random access times, which affect sleeping and waking performance). 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, not 20%.
Re:Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome
by SomeCallMeTim on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @09:38PM
(#5366256)
SSDs are great. But I have exactly one hard drive bay in my laptop, and it currently holds >580Gb of data. Some of that is bloat, but MOST of it is real data; I have lots of raw video, source art for games, music, and many folders of compiled object files. I'm a game developer, so I use a lot of hard drive.
From what I've read, an SSD has an expected life of about 1-2 years. Aside from not being able to afford $2500 JUST for an SSD to hold my data [1], I can't fathom paying that much every 1-2 years as the drives die. Not to mention downtime and potential lost data (between the back-up and the failure).
I'd love to have an SSD. In a year or two, I probably will, as the costs will likely drop.
But until then, yes, the performance has objectively dropped.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technology-2-5-Inch-Performance-OC...
It objectively doesn't make your program run better to waste RAM.
If RAM usage goes up 2x every two years but RAM and hard drive speed go up 20% in the same time period, then using more RAM when you don't need it is making programs more sluggish to start and to suspend to disk, and it's making computers draw more power while sleeping (to keep that much RAM alive -- the D in DRAM means every bit in the RAM needs to be refreshed continuously).